Talking to the Dead (29 page)

Maggie, in her confession, tried to position herself as a young, innocent child when the raps began, but in fact she was already an adolescent
with a will of her own. She surely wasn't entirely subject to Leah's wishes—or the spirits'—in continuing to hold seances for friends and strangers, first in Rochester and then in New York. She also relished and needed the excitement that came with her life as a medium, and she enjoyed the financial rewards too.

Until, that is, she encountered Elisha Kent Kane and began to dream about what she called “the pleasures of a quiet home, the blessings of love—the reward of virtue.” Then the world of the spirits and those who called upon them seemed tedious and dismal indeed.

Like Leah, in becoming a public medium, Maggie chose to invent a new self, to accept the designation of high priestess (or to defy the label con artist). What destroyed her was her failure to do what Leah later managed to accomplish: to create a third self. In the end she was unable to transform herself into the genteel, upper-class girl who could be accepted by Elisha Kent Kane and his family. If self-invention is in the American tradition, so too is the failure to succeed and the desperation that can follow.

Kate, only eleven years old when the raps began, early on seems to have lost the sense of a self she could shape. More than either of her sisters, she came to be viewed as a cipher; others looked through her to the reflection of their own needs and desires. Elisha Kent Kane saw in Kate his lover's sister, a girl to use as a go-between; Charles Livermore saw the essence of his beloved Estelle; Sarah Taylor saw her children happy in heaven. Everyone who cared about Kate believed that they protected her, but it's possible that no one, not even Maggie, ever did.

The intensely personal quality of Kate's spirit messages inevitably raises the possibility that the invisible beings who spoke through her represented a part of herself, that she developed what later came to be called a split personality or multiple personality disorder. But in the field of psychology the existence of such an illness is controversial; moreover, perhaps the only entity as elusive as a spirit is the unconscious.

Merry and mischievous as a child, Kate seems to have grown increasingly self-effacing, her demeanor not unlike that of a sweet-faced, genteel heroine. With her ethereal presence, she became the prototype of the passive medium, a role that allowed women to assume a measure of
power while seeming to remain powerless. In embodying this role, Kate may have exerted more influence over the course of Spiritualism and the nature of mediumship than either of her more forceful sisters. But as the century wore on, many women, even mediums, sought to exercise their power in the wider world more directly, leaving Kate behind.

Kate is central to the mystery of the Fox sisters. The first one, according to her sister Maggie, who made the raps. The original medium, said her mother, Capron, and Leah. The Fox sister who drew the most attention from investigators such as Partridge and Greeley. Mischief maker, magician, medium.

1888 to the Present

T
HE MAINSTREAM PAPERS
called Maggie's confession a “death-blow,” and a book titled
The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: Being the True Story of the Fox Sisters, As Revealed by Authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken
came out shortly after Maggie's appearance at the Academy of Music in the fall of 1888. Written by Reuben Briggs Davenport, a professional author whose other books were unrelated to Spiritualism,
The Death-Blow to Spiritualism
featured a frontispiece authorizing it as “a true account of the origin of Spiritualism,” signed by Maggie and Kate. The book essentially repeated and enlarged upon Maggie's confession, adding a few sensational points. According to Maggie, some if not all seances had moved wide of their original purpose: they were no longer gatherings of a religious or scientific nature but bacchanals at which nude females, wearing the sheerest of gauze, pretended to be apparitions and at which purported spirits gave their imprimatur to sexual orgies in the dark.

Some Spiritualists reacted to Maggie's confession and accusations with compassion. Several weeks after her appearance at the Academy of
Music, the spirit of Samuel B. Brittan, formerly the publisher of the
Spiritual Telegraph,
delivered his views at a seance, allegedly communicating them from the other world—the Summerland, as Spiritualists call it.

“Life has not been full of sunshine,” for the Fox sisters, the spirit acknowledged. Although Maggie was a genuine medium with wonderful powers, “the band of spirits attending Margaret Fox during the early part of her career” no longer followed her. Instead, “
other
unseen intelligences, who are not scrupulous in their dealings with humanity” had become her untrustworthy companions. The Fox sisters, Brittan's spirit warned, had become “false witnesses.”
¹

Other Spiritualists, mortal ones, charged that Maggie had switched sides simply for financial reasons. Since she had ceased to make a decent living as a medium, they argued, she had decided to support herself as one of the movement's fiercest critics. The
Banner of Light
reported that she was touring with the dentist and magician, Dr. Richmond, to make money on her toe-snapping demonstrations but that at one stop she had looked so unwell that a hotel clerk assumed she was “a victim of dipsomania.”
²

A third strategy adopted by Spiritualists was to remind one another and the world that Kate and Maggie were only incidental to the history of the movement. In a statement made at the Boston Spiritual Temple Society, the medium Mrs. R. S. Lillie reminded her audience that “these girls were no more the founders of Spiritualism than the chair, tables, or turnips that were thrown from room to room of the [Hydesville] house.”
³

Lest her listeners miss the point, Mrs. Lillie stressed that Kate and Maggie “were but the means in the hands of invisible intelligences at work earlier than this through Andrew Jackson Davis and others who were mesmerized, he, however, giving to the public the most prominent spiritual results.”

Leah kept her head down and managed to avoid the conflict and to sidestep blame, at least from other Spiritualists. She and her husband, Daniel, continued the pattern they had established when they married in 1858, more than thirty years before. They entertained their host of friends in their comfortable home, their parlor filled with the sound of lively mortal conversation and perhaps still with the occasional immortal rap. A
friend later recalled that Leah's table, the same one at which the Fox sisters had held their early seances in Rochester, was a large one that “rarely showed a vacant chair around it.”
⁴

In the months immediately after the events at the Academy of Music, Kate occasionally toured to repeat the accusations against Spiritualism, even appearing in Rochester, the city where she and Maggie had first made their name. One dramatic billboard, illustrated with a picture of Kate rapping for the Russian czar, announced:

 

MODERN SPIRITUALISM

Born March 31, 1848

Died at Rochester, Nov. 15, 1888

Aged 40 years, 7 months and 15 Days

Born of Mischief and

Gone to the Mischief 5

 

In January 1889, however, Kate wrote to a friend that she thought there was money to be made by proving that the knockings were
not
made with the toes. “So many people come to me to ask me about this exposure of Maggie's that I have to deny myself to them,” she complained. “They are hard at work to expose the whole thing
if they can,
” she observed, then added without explanation, “but they certainly cannot.”
⁶

A reporter for the
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
commented that Kate was “in the hands of a professional exposer of Spiritualism” and that she spoke in a practiced, inauthentic manner, from rote rather than from the heart. The reporter didn't indicate whether or not she gave a demonstration of the toe-cracking technique along with delivering her statement, but he concluded that Kate hadn't lost faith in the spirits.
⁷

It seemed to some Spiritualists that Maggie's war against the spirits also hadn't been authentic. On November 16, 1889, a year after her public confession, Maggie recanted that devastating attack in an interview conducted in the presence of Henry J. Newton, the president of the First Society of Spiritualists of New York and a fellow of the New York Academy of Science. His wife and two other witnesses were in the room.
⁸

“Would to God that I could undo the injustice I did the cause of Spiritualism under the strong psychological influence of persons who were opposed to it,” Maggie admitted. “I gave expression to utterances that had no foundation in fact and that would at the time throw discredit on the Spiritual phenomena.”

Her decision to recant, she said, was not made of her own volition but was an impulse that came from her spirit guides. Otherwise, she herself might have wished to avoid the insults she expected to be hurled at her from all sides—by those who had encouraged her first confession as well as by those Spiritualists she was now hoping to appease.

Asked whether her motive for recanting was to take revenge on those who had promised her a profit for exposing Spiritualism, Maggie insisted that she only wanted to set the record straight. She vaguely attributed part of the blame for the original exposé to powerful Catholics who had pressured her into rejecting Spiritualism. It's likely that, since she claimed to have converted to Catholicism, the church indeed frowned on her continued practice of holding seances. Talking to the dead in the Catholic Church was considered a matter more suited to exorcism than to celebration.

She testified that she hadn't been bribed to recant by wealthy Spiritualists. But she candidly admitted that she hoped to earn an income by resuming her lecture tour, this time on Spiritualism's behalf.

“My great ambition is to repair the wrong I have done,” she said, “but you know that even a mortal instrument in the hands of the spirit must have the maintenance of life.”

Above all, the spirits remained powerful forces in her life, she told her listeners. Far from abandoning her for her treachery, they sometimes rapped so loudly that they even woke her neighbors.

Word of Maggie's recantation spread, and just as she had predicted, her reversal didn't protect her from the slings and arrows hurled at her from all sides. A well-known magician, Joseph Rinn, maintained that one evening he smuggled her under the assumed name of Mrs. Spencer into a debate about Spiritualism, a well-attended event held at the Manhattan Liberal Club, one of New York's political and dining clubs for gentlemen. She looked so worn and dissipated, Rinn asserted, that even her oldest
friends didn't recognize her. “Mrs. Spencer,” whoever she was, revealed many tricks of the trade, explaining how mediums wrote messages on blank slates by using either their teeth or their feet.

Leah continued to be lauded by Spiritualists as a kind of queen mother. At a gathering of the First Society of Spiritualists at Apollo Hall in the spring of 1889, she delivered “touching remarks” beneath a portrait of Margaret, her mother, which she had loaned to the society for the occasion.
⁹

On November 1, 1890, Leah died at her home in New York City. According to her death certificate, she had been suffering from carditis, an inflammation of the heart that had been exacerbated by “nervous excitability.” Her age was listed as a girlish seventy-two instead of the more realistic seventy-seven or seventy-eight. She was buried in the Underhill plot at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, where she was followed the next summer by Daniel.

A few months before Leah's death, Kate had visited her old friends George and Sarah Taylor, who had recently returned from Europe. It was the first time she had seen them in three years, but within a few minutes she had picked up a pencil and paper and produced a message.

“My Dear Sarah,” the message read, “How happy we are to talk with you in this way. We have been with you often, Sarah, so often, and helped you at all times.”
¹⁰

The message was signed “Olin.” Frankie and Leila soon crowded into the room, their characteristic little jokes and laughter inaudible to all but the medium's ear, as showers of raps announced the children's presence. Within a few weeks, even the venerable Dr. Franklin had returned. But after visiting the Taylors sporadically for a year, Kate dropped from sight completely in March 1891. George Taylor tried to find her, but she had moved and left no forwarding address.

Another year passed before they heard from her again. In February 1892 Kate invited the Taylors to visit her at 609 Columbus Avenue in New York, her new home. For the next three months Sarah and George occasionally called on her there, and they received many messages about their troubled finances. On June 1, 1892, Benjamin Franklin kindly advised Sarah and George not to worry about practical burdens.

“All that you have to do is keep a watchful eye with us, and there will be no loss,” he counseled. “Management will soon be better. I see…bright changes…. God bless you, now and forever.”
¹¹

This was the last message that George and Sarah Taylor received through the mediumship of Kate Fox. A month later they received a telegram from Ferdie informing them that his mother had died on July 2 and asking them to come to him immediately. “And so it was!” Sarah wrote in her journal, adding that Kate had been on her last drinking spree when she died.

Sarah Taylor had met with the medium intermittently over a period approaching a quarter of a century, and she had assembled a detailed thousand-page record of their seances. Sarah's notes were later published by her son, William Langworthy Taylor, under the title
Fox-Taylor Automatic Writing 1869–1892: Unabridged Record,
a work that represents an invaluable contribution to the history of Modern Spiritualism and the Fox sisters.

Kate's death certificate listed her age as fifty-three, most likely two years younger than her actual age, and the cause of death as “chronic diffuse nephritis,” a disease of the kidneys. Her occupation was registered for posterity simply as “housewife.” Greenwood Cemetery was the intended burial place, but perhaps someone in the Underhill family objected, or there was no money for the internment. Kate's body was placed in a temporary vault.

Sarah's mourning was deep, but it was not for Kate alone. “The loss of this vehicle of communication between my loved [ones], to whom I cannot speak directly, and ourselves is very great and at present seems irreparable,” she wrote soon after Kate's death.
¹²

At the time Maggie was penniless, living in an apartment at 456 West Fifty-Seventh Street that had been loaned to her by Henry J. Newton, president of the First Society of Spiritualists. On March 4, 1893, her old friend Titus Merritt, a Spiritualist bookseller who had known her family since the 1860s, was notified that she was ill. Two days later he arranged for her to be moved to the home of another loyal friend, Emily Ruggles, who lived on State Street in Brooklyn.

Ruggles took care of Maggie that night, March 6, and Merritt stayed with her the following night, March 7. A few hours before dawn, at 4:30
AM
on March 8, 1893, fifty-nine-year-old Maggie died. She went peacefully, Merritt later wrote, without a struggle. Her heart had given out. Kate's body was removed from its temporary vault, and through the kindness of another old friend, Joseph LaFumee, Maggie and her younger sister were buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, together in death as in life.
¹³

The
Banner of Light
marked Maggie's transition to the Summerland with articles and letters. One writer, Mrs. Willis, noted that it seemed “but a few years since that Margaret and Katie Fox were sought for and interviewed, and could command almost any sums for the simple exercise of uncommon powers.” They had failed “to hold themselves to a high standard,” she continued, “and both of them lost prestige and power.”
¹⁴

Mrs. Willis discussed their rise and fall, however, without the vituperative disappointment that Spiritualists had directed so often at the Fox sisters in their later years. Instead, she cautioned that “we have yet to learn over again this lesson, sensitives are subject to conditions.

“When the nations of ancient times called on their mediums they made them feel their importance by consecration, and by preparing for them suitable abodes and temples…. But we of modern times take the blessing of mediumship and forget the mediator.”

She concluded, “Therefore no word of censure or reproach can be cast on this mortal career….”